Natural parenting: Why understanding the evolved needs of our children matters!

Conventional parenting advice is based on the assumption  that children are born inherently flawed.

In apparent support of this, children don't seem to want to do what we parents would like them to want to do!

They don’t want to sleep alone.

They don’t sleep through the night.

They constantly want to be held.

They cry all the time.

They don’t help out with chores.

They try manipulating us into giving them what they want.

They don’t share.

They don’t want to eat their vegetables.

They are selfish.

They don’t care about the emotions of other people.

In the face of all these flaws, the job of parents is to fix all of these deficits and make sure children turn into socially acceptable human beings.

And experts in mainstream parenting approaches provide parents with the knowledge, tools, and gadgets that aid in doing so.

But underneath all of this, the premise remains the same: children come with all these deficits and it is our job to fix them.

But here is the problem with this premise: It isn’t true!

Children aren’t born flawed at all.

They are not mini-adults that come with all these deficits we need to fix. 

They are born as perfect children. 

When we take an evolutionary perspective, this becomes easy to see.

An evolutionary perspective is based on the premise that the psychology and physiology of humans, and all living creatures and organisms, has been shaped by the environment such that it maximizes their chances to survive long enough to successfully reproduce and get as many genes as possible as far into the future as possible.

For every generation, over the billions of years that life has existed on this planet, the environment acts as a type of sieve: Only some organisms can pass through this filter into the next generation.

This means that all organisms - including humans! -  fit into some environments and not others.

If you saw a palm tree growing at the top of mount Everest, you would be confused.

The reason why you would be confused is that palm trees and snow don’t mix!

Palm trees have been designed by evolution to live in warmer latitudes and cannot survive in freezing temperatures for very long.  

There are some palm trees, planted by people, where we live, in Vancouver Canada, and they are barely hanging on…    

Animals too are fitted by natural selection to certain environments and not others. 

Whales belong in the oceans and not in a temperate rainforest while it is the exact opposite for black bears.

When it comes to social species, like humans, the evolutionary process tacks on an interesting twist.

It is not only the environment that decides which individuals make more copies of themselves - but also other individuals!

Other male elk decide who among them define the next elk generation by butting heads, literally.

For the bowerbird, the female decides - and will choose a mate based on how impressive his installation is.

For humans, there is a mutual dance of both parties.

But what we look for in a mate, itself, is shaped by evolution. 

We want our children to survive in the environment they live in and also achieve social status by being a good member of Team Human.  

To give their children the best shot to survive into adulthood, and, in turn, attract a partner, we humans are generally most attracted to those potential partners that signal that their genes promise good outcomes. Such signals include, for example, status, money, looks, emotional intelligence, and kindness. 

This is why ads use good-looking models.

Why beauty products for both men and women sell so well.

Why people work long hours to make more money than they really need.

Of course, even though this is how evolution has shaped our motivation, this does not mean that we are consciously aware of it, nor does this mean that every individual will always act perfectly in line with the goals of evolution. But using an evolutionary perspective as a guiding framework to understand human behavior and psychology is nonetheless extremely useful.

So when we take an evolutionary perspective the question becomes ‘Why do humans behave the way they do?’ ‘How was this behavior adaptive over our evolutionary past?’ ‘How has it helped us survive and/or successfully reproduce?’

And for children those evolutionary pressures are different than for adults!

While the job of adults is to find a “good” partner, have children, and make sure those children become successful adults, the job of children is to survive into adulthood and learn the skills and knowledge they need to be successful within the particular society they are born into.

And so the question becomes, ‘How has evolution shaped our children?’

Why don’t they want to sleep alone?

Why don’t they sleep through the night?

Why do they constantly want to be held?

Why don’t they want to eat their vegetables?

Why do they cry all the time?

Why don’t they help out with chores?

Why do they try manipulating us into giving them what they want?

Why don’t they share?

Why are they selfish?

Why don’t they care about the emotions of other people?

When we understand the reasons behind these behaviors, we understand that children are actually not flawed at all. That they have evolved to behave in ways that maximize their chances to survive. If that wasn’t the case, humans would no longer exist. 

So, for example, for most of human history, any child that slept by themselves, would not have survived long; they would have become easy prey for a lion or tiger.

Sleeping through the night without waking up limits how much children can feed during the night.

Being put down somewhere alone would have increased the risk of being eaten.

Joyously and uncritically eating all kinds of vegetables would have meant potentially eating something poisonous.

Not crying would have meant letting some need go unmet. 

All of these behaviors would have decreased the likelihood of the child surviving!  

And, as a result: All of these behaviors are deeply rooted in a child’s psychology, 

It is written in their DNA. 

The fact that many of these risks (such as a lion eating a baby sleeping alone or accidentally eating a vegetable that is poisonous) are pretty much gone in the modern world is irrelevant to children’s shaped preferences and needs. 

They have no way of understanding this and no amount of training can change that. 

When we don’t understand their evolved needs and ignore them, they suffer, and as a result act in ways that irritate us.

This then gets taken as further evidence that children are naturally flawed creatures. 

We fail to see that it was how we parent that caused this outcome.

It is as if we bought a house plant that said ‘plenty of sunlight’ on the info card, put it in a shady corner, and then - when it began to get droopy, we blamed the nature of the plant! 

And then maybe bought some special soil to correct the problem!

Children in the modern world generally don’t die when we ignore their evolved needs. But their well-being suffers. 

Because they want to sleep close to their parents so badly, they experience a lot of stress when we force them to sleep alone. Stress that affects how their nervous system gets shaped. 

Because they are put down on their backs rather than being on our bodies, their muscle tonus is weaker, and they often develop a flat spot on the back of their heads.

Because they are forced to eat a vegetable they find disgusting, they develop a distaste for those vegetables that follows them into adulthood, and they are more prone to eating disorders.  

But this isn’t the whole story!

When we don’t understand the evolved needs of children and assume they have all of these deficits we need to correct, we inadvertently create those deficits in them.

In cultures, where people still have an intuitive understanding of what children need, where they parent in-line with these evolved needs, where they don’t parent from a deficit model, babies don’t cry much. Children naturally help out with chores. Children don’t try to manipulate their parents. They freely share. They cooperate. They care about the emotions of others. They become independent earlier! 

And parents and other adults alike, as you can imagine, enjoy being around children much more. 

They also don’t view parenting as a daunting job for which they need the help of experts, learn all the tools, and buy expensive gadgets.

Parents from such cultures are embedded in parenting norms that work with our evolved nature - and not against it.

They simply parent the way we have always parented.

The way we have evolved to parent.

The way nature intended. 

And as part of this, they have a large network of other people, the proverbial village, that helps them. 

It is our goal to help people in the West to get back to this way of parenting. 

To get back to understanding children; understanding what they need, why they behave the way they do, and how to parent in ways that satisfy their evolved needs. 

To re-discover their inner voice. And trust it.

And to find ways to do this that work in our modern world while respecting the needs and well-being of children and their parents alike.

So that everyone can thrive. And parenting becomes a little easier and a lot more fun, and lays the foundaiton for  a life-long respectful and loving relationship with our children.